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The Tortilla Takes a Road Trip to Korea

Korean-style tacos at Namu in San Francisco. Credit
Noah Berger for The New York Times

TOMAS LEE has long dreamed of selling American consumers on Korean barbecue.

Mr. Lee, a 42-year-old native of Seoul, South Korea, who grew up in Mustang, Okla., took a step toward realizing that dream in October 2009 when he opened Hankook Taqueria in Atlanta, serving tacos stuffed with soy- and garlic-marinated beef, along with chicken and pork, all barbecued in the Korean style.

“I was going to open a traditional Korean barbecue restaurant,” Mr. Lee said. Then his wife, Mackenzie, had an idea. “She saw this thing about Kogi on the Web,” he recalled. “And I thought tacos might be a way to get Korean food on everybody’s table.”

What captured Ms. Lee’s attention was Kogi Korean BBQ-To-Go, a retrofitted catering truck that rolled onto the streets of Southern California in November 2008, selling corn tortillas piled with Korean-style barbecued short ribs known as kalbi, garnished with onion, cilantro and a hash of chili-soy-dressed lettuce.

Eighteen months later, dozens of entrepreneurs across the country are selling Korean tacos. Like Buffalo wings and California rolls, Korean tacos have gone national, this time with unprecedented speed. Few of these entrepreneurs appear to have made pilgrimages to Southern California to eat at a Kogi truck. (There are now five.) Many, especially those of Korean ancestry, say they studied news media reports of the Kogi concept, recognized their culture at the core, and made the concept their own.

“You get the feeling that this is our chance to mainstream Korean food,” said Jae Kim, a Seoul native, selling Korean tacos since February at his Chi’Lantro truck in Austin, Tex. “And it’s happening so quickly. It’s like everybody is realizing that it’s now or never.”

“I’ve never tasted anything like this before,” said Tim Burroughs, a recent customer at Hankook Taqueria. “It’s as if they’re making up a cuisine as they go.”

Granted, Koreans have long eaten kalbi wrapped in lettuce leaves, in a taco-like fashion. But it’s a 21st-century paradox that Korean food, still considered exotic by many Americans, has begun to gain widespread acceptance, when wrapped in a Mexican flatbread and topped with taco truck embellishments.

Last month in Indianapolis, John Ban, 31, raised in Indiana by Korean parents, and Arnold Park, 28, a native of Seoul, began selling $2 tacos — corn tortillas piled with nubs of beef, chopped onions, cilantro leaves and red jalapeño salsa — late at night to club kids who visited their West Coast Tacos truck.

“First we were going to move to Korea and open a regular taco truck,” said Mr. Ban, who has worked as a D.J. and hip-hop artist. “Then we thought we’d do a Korean taco truck in Korea. We settled on doing a Korean taco truck in Indianapolis.”

“The meat makes it Korean,” said Mr. Ban, who marinates chuck roll in a soy and garlic sauce that is traditionally used with Korean barbecue dishes. “The tortilla and the toppings are a way to tell our customers that this food is O.K., that this food is American.”

Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee, a native of Seoul, raised in Southern California by parents who ran a bodega that catered to a Mexican clientele, said the Mexican-Korean culinary connection was born of proximity.

“The idea of Korean tacos isn’t new,” said Ms. Lee, who wrote a guidebook to South Korea and recently finished writing a Mexican cookbook. “Koreans run stores. They hire Mexican workers. They eat together.”

“Before, when Koreans ran out of rice and grabbed a tortilla to go with our kalbi, we called it lunch,” she added. “Now we call it a Korean taco.”

But he worries about what will happen as more and more restaurateurs adopt the form.

“If Kogi-inspired trucks change how American eats, I’ll be a pig in slop,” Mr. Choi told a November 2009 gathering of chefs at the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone campus in St. Helena, Calif. “But if their food isn’t any good, I’ll be Kurt Cobain.”

Mr. Choi’s day of reckoning may come soon, for Kogi-inspired tacos are now legion.

Four Portland vendors compete with Koi Fusion, including Boolkogi, Bulkogi and Korean Twist.

In the Bay Area, home to a half-dozen or so operators, Jomar Guevarra, a Filipino, and Sam Pak, born in California to Korean parents, work the MoGo truck, dishing short-rib tacos as well as bacon-wrapped and kimchi-topped hot dogs.

Although Korean taco saturation is greatest in California, the growth of the genre is not restricted to the West Coast.

At Meritage in Philadelphia, Anne Coll, former chef of the Chinese-French restaurant Susanna Foo, serves a Wednesday night special of braised short-rib tacos, topped with kimchi. (The sous chef Ann Suk Miller, whose mother is Korean, previously served a very similar dish at Ansill, another restaurant in the city.)

In Chicago, Steve Lee, born in the countryside outside Seoul, serves chips and salsa, aguas frescas and kimchi-topped tacos at Taco Chino, a restaurant he opened in December in a strip mall.

“A lot of Mexican restaurants have just one flavor,” Mr. Lee said. “I wanted to add another flavor.”

Also in town, Del Seoul, featuring Korean-inspired dishes like kalbi tacos stuffed with short ribs and the rice dish bibimbap threaded with turnip greens, plans to open late this summer.

Trend-conscious restaurateurs, some with few apparent ties to Korea, have also adopted Korean tacos as their own.

In Brooklyn, the Oaxaca restaurants advertise “traditional Mexican fare,” but serve specials of kalbi tacos topped with Asian pear slaw. Sagaponack, a seafood restaurant and raw bar in the Flatiron district of Manhattan named for a Long Island village, serves kalbi tacos and pesto fries.

Meanwhile, in January, Ducks Eatery, set within SPiN, a table tennis parlor in the Flatiron district, began serving short-rib tacos with oyster kimchi and miso aioli.

While the trend, which Mr. Kwon of Koi Fusion has called “the movement,” shows no signs of abating, a few Korean taco businesses have already come and gone.

Yummo, a frozen yogurt cafe in Kansas City, Mo., that sold short-rib tacos with homemade kimchi, closed last fall. Kogi Shop, a Korean taco truck in Oklahoma City that was started in November 2009 by a Korean husband-and-wife team from Los Angeles, last updated its Twitter feed in March.

The partners had planned a trip to Los Angeles to sample Kogi’s food. But then it hit them. “My wife is Chinese,” Mr. Ward recalled. “Why would I try Korean tacos when I could try Chinese tacos? So I texted Tan. I wrote ‘char siu taco.’ And he wrote back ‘brilliant.’ ”

Recalibration has already begun.

Namu is a sleek restaurant in San Francisco operated by the brothers Dennis, Daniel and David Lee. They call their cookery “cutting edge, new California.” Born in the United States to Korean parents, the Lees serve dishes like asparagus with guanciale, maitake mushrooms and a tofu-sesame purée.

Now on the dinner menu are “real Korean tacos,” of kalbi and sesame rice, topped with kimchi remoulade and daikon salsa, folded into toasted seaweed pouches.

“Every time someone from the press called, they asked if we made Korean tacos,” David Lee said. “It was like we were being typecast. They were thinking, ‘Hey, you’re Korean, you must make Korean tacos.’ ”